In the early hours of July 10, armed SWAT officers burst through the doors of an apartment belonging to organizers of Occupy Seattle as part of an ongoing investigation into the May Day riots. Phillip Neel, one of the residents of that apartment, talks about the ordeal.

Devices that intercept calls and text messages and dig into data stored on your mobile phone are being marketed to police departments across the United States “as being perfect for covert operations in public order situations.” Or, as the ACLU’s Privacy SOS blog puts it: protests.

Occupy protesters in Seattle tossed $5,000 out of a top window of downtown Seattle’s Roosevelt hotel on the Fourth of July. The action was against the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which removed a federal ban on corporate spending in political campaigns.

A judge in Manhattan ruled Monday that Twitter must turn over some three months’ worth of data from the account of an Occupy Wall Street protester who is being prosecuted on charges of disorderly conduct.

Two recently foiled “terrorist plots” that the U.S. government and mainstream media connected to the Occupy movement turned out to have been facilitated by federal agents. But that fact has “not stopped many from branding Occupy with an unfavorable stain,” RT reports.

In the seventh episode of “The World Tomorrow,” Julian Assange and key Occupy figures from both sides of the Atlantic met in a hollowed-out Deutsche Bank building to talk about the movement’s inception and the challenges it has faced so far.

Reflecting on his arrest with Kurt Vonnegut while protesting apartheid outside the South African consulate in the early 1980s, David Lindorff, founder of the news blog This Can’t Be Happening, says he and the author might be treated differently if they were arrested today.

Police stopped and drew guns on a group of independent journalists who were driving home after covering the NATO protests in Chicago on Monday evening. Tim Pool and Luke Rudkowski, two of the best-known live streamers covering the Occupy movement, believe they may have been targeted.

Protesters coaxed by federal agents into plotting terrorist attacks are imprisoned without bond while known terrorists are allowed to walk free the day of their arrest. The difference? Political ideology: The entrapped “criminals” are associates of the Occupy movement, while the actual terrorists are merely well-established violent white supremacists.

Two men involved in the NATO summit protests in Chicago are being held on separate terrorism charges. One is accused of making a false threat about blowing up a highway overpass. The other is charged with discussing the making of a pipe bomb.

On Sunday, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars led thousands of people in a march on the NATO summit in Chicago, at the end of which 50 former soldiers renounced the wars by throwing their military service medals toward the building where leaders were gathered.

One percent of the adult human population qualifies as clinically psychopathic, exhibiting a lack of empathy and a knack for telling lies and getting away with it. That compares with 10 percent of wheeler-dealers on Wall Street, according to a recent study. American critic William Deresiewicz is not surprised. Update: The 1-in-10 figure is unsupported. See here.

Despite a judge’s order to hand over the tweets of The New Inquiry Senior Editor Malcolm Harris, who was arrested in October marching with Occupy protesters across the Brooklyn Bridge, Twitter is fighting for the principle that its users own their communications and should determine what to do with them.

“When you have high unemployment and a lot of underutilized capacity, the idea is you cut public budgets? That’s insane. Because that leads to a shrinking of the entire economy, when the real problem is … the ratio of debt to the size of the economy overall,” says the former Labor secretary. “If you shrink the economy, that ratio becomes worse and worse.”

After the first few years of the Great Depression there was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it.” It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

Retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard was arrested for the second time as part of the Occupy protests. His moral and intellectual courage stands in stark contrast with the timidity of nearly all clergy and congregants in all of our major religious institutions.

There were doubts about whether Occupy Wall Street could pull off the massive day of protest its organizers spent many months planning. But demonstrators in New York City and elsewhere joined forces with labor unions and immigrant-rights activists to remind the public that there is a working class and May 1 is its holiday.

OWS communications coordinator Shawn Carrié was walking home at 9 p.m. on May Day when nine plainclothes police officers approached him, took his belongings, placed him in handcuffs and put him in a van. He was questioned about his involvement in Occupy Wall Street and then spent the next 13 hours in jail.

New York saw what was probably the city’s first ever “guitarmy” this May Day, a march by hundreds of OWS-affiliated musicians led by former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello from midtown’s Bryant Park to Union Square, where they were joined by Immortal Technique, Das Racist and Dan Deacon to fire up protesters with song.

Wondering where to go and what will happen during Occupy Wall Street’s May Day protests? You’re not alone. With the knowledge that Occupy events rarely go according to plan, Natasha Lennard at Salon tries to lick the revolutionary chaos into manageable order.

After UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi’s handling of last fall’s crackdown on Occupy protesters by campus police—the one that inspired an artful meme drawn from shameful circumstances—drew fire, university officials ordered a task force to investigate the pepper-spraying incident of Nov. 18 and issue a report.

Two people were hospitalized Tuesday evening after Santa Monica (Calif.) College police officers allegedly pepper-sprayed a crowd of students and others protesting tuition increases outside a meeting of the college’s board of trustees. An investigation to determine who released the spray is under way.

Throughout the recession, Apple’s growth has brought hope to many; China’s creative class and human capital cannot catch up to the U.S.’; meanwhile, Western intervention in Afghanistan has obviously failed, but by how much? These discoveries and more after the jump.

Occupiers are accusing New York police officers of beating and neglecting a woman who had a seizure after being handcuffed during the breakup of the movement’s six-month anniversary party in Zuccotti Park on Saturday night.

Earlier this month, several members of LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous, were charged with hacking, reportedly on the basis of reports from an FBI informer described in the media as a leader of LulzSec, notorious for its exploits against Sony, the CIA, the U.S. Senate, the FBI, Visa, MasterCard and PayPal.

Young people the world over demonstrating against economic injustice are met with state-sanctioned violence and insults in the mainstream media, rather than informed dialogue, critical engagement and reformed policies.

The radical corners of the Internet have been ringing loudly over a piece of legislation passed with near unanimous support last week that protesters are calling the “anti-Occupy” bill. The new law mostly updates a set of rules already in place, however.

Liberia is considering two proposals that would make consensual same-sex acts punishable with jail time; NATO refuses to get involved in the crisis in Syria; and a Jewish journalist killed by terrorists was baptized posthumously by the Mormon Church. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Since Occupy and the Arab Spring, the animating message of Schell’s “Unconquerable World”—that, in the age of nuclear weaponry, nonviolent action is the mightiest of forces—has undergone a renaissance of sorts.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Lawrence Lessig discusses his new e-book, “One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic,” and his optimism that movements like Occupy Wall Street can help set our democracy back on course.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Lawrence Lessig discusses his new e-book, “One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic,” and his optimism that movements like Occupy Wall Street can help set our democracy back on course.

A look inside Foxconn gives us a new perspective on workers’ conditions; one solution to the “right to be forgotten” dilemma may be to implement mandatory online insurance; meanwhile, a Columbia grad in New York has been converting pay phone booths into libraries. These discoveries and more after the jump.